Monday, November 20, 2017

How, if you are working for the thought police, do you force people to adhere to your
views? One way is to silence the opposition, to shut them down, to force them out
of their jobs and to ban them from the national conversation.

But, what happens when someone is so famous that you cannot
silence him? What happens when he breaks through the barriers to free
expression and states heretical views in major media outlets?

Surely, you want to limit the risk that any lesser
intellectual light will take him as a role model, will take his views into
account, will consider them seriously. So, you attack him. You especially
attack his motives, painting him as a traitor to the cause, someone who is in
it for his own personal self-aggrandizement, and whose views must be discounted
and ignored. Anyone who does not have academic tenure or emeritus status will
think long and hard before expressing similar opinions.

Such is apparently the case with Russia scholar Stephen
Cohen. As it happens I have occasionally presented Cohen’s analysis of the Trump
administration Putin policy. Clearly, he is an outlier. He favors détente and
cooperation between the United States and Russia. He does not believe that
Vladimir Putin is the Devil incarnate.

You might agree. You might not. But Cohen knows Russia and he knows Russian history. Being an outlier is not necessarily a bad thing. If
everyone has agreed to a consensus view, that view is most
likely to be incorrect.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has set forth the reaction
to Cohen’s views. It has mostly come from the progressive and radical left. No
surprise there:

Writing
in The New Republic, Isaac
Chotiner called Cohen "Putin’s
American apologist." Jonathan Chait in New York magazine labeled him
a "dupe" and
"a septuagenarian, old-school leftist who has carried on the mental habits
of decades of anti-anti-communism seamlessly into a new career of
anti-anti-Putinism." Cathy Young in Slate said Cohen was "repeating
Russian misinformation" and "recycling this
propaganda." And there are many others who share those views, even at the
magazine his wife [Katrina Vanden Heuvel] runs [The Nation]….

But the
attacks in the media have stung. Vanden Heuvel can recite the worst of them.
And they have also started to come from inside The Nation, where editors and reporters wonder if Cohen’s
influence is responsible for the country’s leading left-wing magazine taking
the side of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on U.S.-Russia policy.

One might ask which of these critics—and there are many,
many more—has Cohen’s depth of understanding about Russia. One would reply that
none of them does. And one would reply that they are not offering a reasoned
response. They are engaging in ad hominem attacks, because that is all that
they know how to do.

The message has reached those that it was supposed to reach:
those with less power and less influence and more at risk:

Cohen
thinks that young scholars are afraid to voice views similar to his. He says he
gets email to that effect. "They’re going to be careful. And you can’t be
a good scholar and be careful."

For those who have missed the debate the Chronicle sets out
some of Cohen’s views:

On the
show, Cohen unleashes the opinions that have turned him into one of the least
popular Russia experts in America. Speaking about the 2014 Ukrainian revolution
that led to Russia’s invasion, he asks: "If you’re sitting in the Kremlin,
and you see this as surreptitious NATO expansion, and Ukraine, which is
virtually a kinship of Russia, do you do nothing?" Putin "is
reacting. … He had few alternatives." He continues: "If we’re going
to ask who undermined Ukrainian democracy, it wasn’t Putin." It was
Western leaders….

He
similarly blames America for panicking about Russian interference in the 2016
U.S. presidential election. "Why did America embrace what is clearly, or
seems to be, a fiction for which there is no evidence?" He speculates on
the answers: Putin was an obstacle to global American hegemony. Another
scenario: "Sinister forces, greedy forces, high in our political system
and in our economy, need Russia as an enemy because it’s exceedingly
profitable." U.S.-Russian relations "didn’t go wrong in Moscow."
They "went wrong in Washington."

Naturally, we want to know about Cohen’s track record as a prognosticator.
In truth, the Chronicle explains, it is fairly good. And it has often run
counter to the conventional wisdom. If you believe that the conventional wisdom
contains grains of truth, you should have a serious rethink.

But
even those who think Cohen is wrong now have to acknowledge that he has been
right about a lot in the past. In addition to his views in the 1970s on the
possibilities of Soviet reforms, he was proved correct in his assessment in the
late 1980s that Gorbachev was a genuine democrat, in contrast to those who,
like Richard Pipes, believed he was merely a kinder, gentler Soviet
apparatchik. In the 1990s, Cohen was among the first to identify Boris Yeltsin
as someone doing deep damage to Russia through his corruption. "Much of
the academy were pro-Yeltsin," recalls Suny. And Cohen was prescient in
observing that post-Cold War NATO expansion would revive Russian nationalism.

Cohen has reached a point where he is one of the few
prominent intellectuals who can get away with such heresy. He said:

"I’m
emeritus at two universities. That means I’m old and I got a lot of health
care. What are they going to do to me?"

They cannot do anything to Cohen... but they can make of him a cautionary tale for anyone who would be tempted to respect his views.

8 comments:

It might be good to write "Stephen F. Cohen" for clarity, with at least 5 scholars by that name on Wikipedia, but easy enough to identify from the disambiguation page, as "American scholar, specializing in Russian studies."

What can they do indeed? Opinions are free, and I can imagine why various self-declared experts wish to dismiss his expert opinions, but obviously it would be better to express their concerns respectfully.

It makes sense a professor of Russian Studies may have some skill at imagining how Russia sees the world, and so he apparently has internalized Putin's motivates as rational from a Russian perspective. But if he was a true scholar I'd also hope he questions his own conclusions. Or just because he can imagine reasons for why Putin acts as his does, that doesn't mean he really knows.

Perhaps while Cohen is waiting for more people to say mean things about him, he should strike up a conversation with Bill Browder, who also has first hand experience with Russia, and they could see what common ground they could find.https://www.gq.com/story/bill-browder-putin-enemy-number-1

TW, I see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_J._Griffiths Griffiths resigned from Duke Divinity School in May 2017 after being reprimanded by Duke Divinity School administration for his strongly worded opposition to diversity training.http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/duke-professor-resigns-after-facing-discipline-for-challenging-diversity-training/118283http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Resigned-From-Duke/240420

It sounds like he's a good candidate for Jonathan Haidt's group:https://heterodoxacademy.org/In fact they referenced the case:https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/05/27/this-weeks-witch-hunt/

It looks like the world needs our "grumpy old men" to keep resisting in many domains, although not resigning would certainly be bolder.